By Tom Hays, The Associated Press
New York (AP) -- A man wanted by police in a brutal robbery was allowed to elude a detective Thursday when a Queens judge ordered a guard to escort the suspect out the back door of her courtroom, police said.
The suspect, Derek Sterling, fled the courthouse and was at large Thursday night. Enraged police officials accused Justice Laura Blackburne of helping a violent fugitive avoid arrest.
“This is outrageous conduct by any measure and beyond the pale for a sitting jurist,” police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement, which called for an investigation of the judge.
A telephone call to the judge’s home went unanswered.
Court officials were “looking into the matter,” Office of Court Administration spokesman David Bookstaver said.
Sterling was wanted in the May 23 mugging of a man outside a Queens social club. Police said a witness identified him as being part of a group of men that beat and stomped the victim, who suffered a broken eye socket.
Sterling also had been charged in a separate drug case. He was attending a hearing in that case before Blackburne around noon Thursday, when the detective arrived and notified the court that he planned to arrest him in the robbery case once the proceeding ended.
While the detective, Leonard Devlin, waited in the hallway outside the courtroom, Blackburne indicated she was upset because he had arrived without an arrest warrant. She also alleged that he tried to set a trap by claiming he was there only to question the suspect.
“I’m not trying to keep you from being arrested,” the judge told Sterling, according to a court transcript. “I’m trying to keep you from being arrested today in my courtroom based on obvious misrepresentations on the part of the detective.”
The judge ordered Sterling to return to a halfway house for recovering drug addicts and directed a court officer to escort him out a rear door.
When the detective learned what had happened, he and other officers searched the courthouse and the surrounding area but failed to find Sterling. They later learned he had not returned to the halfway house.
A call to Sterling’s attorney was not immediately returned.
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Associated Press writer Lukas I. Alpert contributed to this report.